The Sonos Brexit and pragmatic ways past it

@Ryan S I don't think I am alone in commending both @Edward R and you for your significant contributions towards what might be considered to be an anti Sonos thread. If Sonos leadership had the same care and respect for the installed base, this thread would not have been necessary, and the firestorm a lot less in intensity. Kudos, and thank you.

And congratulations to every one here for keeping the thread on topic, and both rant and profanity free. No minor achievement, that. There is nothing we can do stop it from becoming long, then repetitive and thus unwieldy. I can’t see any way around that, but what can be done, is being done.

Those who are planning to freeze their mixed Legacy / Modern Sonos systems might want to take a look at Roon:  https://roonlabs.com

I tried it for a year when they were in the early stages of implementing Sonos hardware integration; while Roon is an amazing personal music library tool, at the time, the Sonos interface still needed work, it’s also not free @ $119 per year.  

After the recent Sonos “Your System Requires Attention” fiasco, I started looking at how to best move forward and revisited Roon. 

I setup a Roon “Core” server installation on my OpenMediaVault NAS this afternoon; it was easy to enable all of my Sonos zones and I was up and running very quickly.  Unless Sonos dramatically changes course, I have decided that any Sonos hardware failures will be replaced with “not Sonos”; Roon can accommodate a mix of hardware.

Roon is now my music and zone controller.  Sonos updates have been turned off at the app layer as well as blocked at my router.  Port 4444 on all Sonos devices is locked down; and electrons no longer travel between my network and update.sonos.com, msmetrics.ws.sonos.com, and ms-metrics-test.ws.sonos.com.  So far so good.

This is not a rant.  

Sonos has severely compromised their integrity.  Hopefully this forum, Commumity Feedback, provides actionable input for SONOS to fairly compensate misinformed purchasers that their Sonos systems could at "anytime" be added on.  

Sonos, Keep up the good work and tell us how SONOS is going to live uo to its GEN 1 sales literature statements.  I have some tehnical suggestions, but will refrain, because SONOS engineers are best qualified to fix their legacy problem by May or shortly thereafter. 

Moving on:

@Ryan S You said - once devices switch over to legacy software, you’ll still be able to add new devices that currently exist.

By currently you mean new as exist in the present moment, and not currently at the time of adding any such in the future? By that I mean those that may be introduced after May.

@User933635 Nice post - and this made my day - they’ll all be lying down in darkened rooms - because even I have just come out after a needed spell in one.

You said:  if I cannot group modern and legacy then all my system will remain legacy and I’ll probably ditch SONOS, which will be a pity

You ought to need to ditch only if you need the new functionality that Sonos will release after the legacy version is forked.

You said: Remember, it is only stuff! - We need to keep remembering that. And neither is it stuff like the Boeing 737 that has killed people.

@andy_120 When I said that the Sonos controller is a must, I was referring to the app, not any physical controller.

@edamame You said: Regarding getting used equipment to fill in holes in your system….how can you tell if it has been put into recycle mode?

The used market has been destroyed by Sonos in even more ways. I know of sellers that are reluctant to sell for fear of being accused of having sold recycled devices. Some one could buy one from you, get the 30% after marking it for recycling, and then come back to you and claim you sold them a lemon? Lesson here is to now be very careful in that market. Unfortunate, but there it is.

No apology needed, all of us have our heads in a spin that can unwittingly affect what is typed. Been there, done that.

To the second part, there is someone posting on this thread that has stayed on the older version to keep the 100 alive. Another has not needed to do so, and is still able to use the 200.

I have neither, but there seems to be an anomaly here somewhere.

If I may now be permitted to introduce myself to make clear my motivation for this thread and to establish that I have no agenda for it other than what is in the topic title, as elaborated in the first post…

I cured myself of a severe obsession with expensive HiFi kit where the music itself had moved into the background, and since 2011, Sonos has been brilliant in enabling that as well as helping me stay cured.

As my post count shows, I was one of the Sonos evangelists and I have also been on the receiving end of the fanboy allegations here often enough.

 All that said, the recent post above by @User933635 has captured in one place a series of things that Sonos has done in the past that has come to start feeling to many like death by a thousand cuts. So the outbreak we see now is also on account of all the accumulated frustration, something like the last straw, except that this isn't as light as that proverbial straw.

I only suffered the loss of the brilliant Sonos Dock; that pissed me off enough to withdraw from here, and lock out updates till I found an efficient work around to it. The ability it delivered to make my play 1 truly portable, needing only mains power to both units to work even where there was no WiFi, is still missed, but I have satisfied my on the road needs with capable BT speakers so that is still nowhere near the kind of dislocation many have suffered in the last couple of years.

And by the way, I still have the Dock - I can't bring myself to just toss such a neat little product into the trash can. Even when for all practical purposes it is dead - I was advised to use it as an iPod charger! If that was tongue in cheek, I did not see the humour at the time.

There is no way I can therefore see myself trashing two Connect Amps, a Connect and two Bridges that are, unlike the Dock, still working like new.

Hence, the change of direction, and this thread.

TY all for recommendations. I have decided to stick to what I have and not update, Keeping it simple.

This is too bad that this happened. I was planning on moving to France and building a B&B or gite biz with sonos everywhere. Guests could turn on/off the speaker when they wanted to.

I guess I will just be a lurker so I can learn.

/lurking mode = 1

Things are looking up.

As mentioned previously, I ordered the Bluesound Node 2i and early this afternoon it arrived. To be perfectly honest, after setting up and adjusting and reconfiguring (though very little of it was to the Sonos side of things) I am, to put it bluntly, ridiculously happy with the way it is all shaping up. I”d for some time (quite some time… years) hoped to see a Connect upgrade, but when it came in the form of the current Port it was clear to me that was not what I was looking for. The Node 2i is everything I wanted it to be, with the exception of not being produced by Sonos (but that’s nearly a non-factor at this point).
For the past many years my modest setup is like this (before today) - I utilize the Connect as a soundbar replacement of sorts and route (for several television sets now, an analogue output has been a requirement for this) the TV’s analog/variable audio via 3.5mm stereo-mini to dual RCA analog input of the Connect. The Connect’s analog output runs to the AUX input of my old 70s Marantz 2235b receiver which in turn powers a pair of speakers (for the past 6 or so years, two Wharfedale Diamond 10.2 speakesr). The rest of my Sonos simply includes 3 additional speakers (two Play:1 units, and one original SOSOS ONE unit) at various locations around the house, one of which I frequent move to wherever it’s needed (currently in a stereo-pair with other Play:1 in my office).
Nearly everything I listen to travels via the Connect, and roughly 80% of the time my TV audio is ran this way (the other 20% simply via the TV’s internal speakers on some occasions), making it easy to put a ballgame on throughout the house, as well as listening sessions via the Sonos controller for music streaming services and streaming from my personal library housed on my NAS using SMB. It’s been possible to listen to my personal audio library via PLEX, which we use extensively for our ripped movies, but the sound quality from the services natively on the Connect was always better than when piped via the variable analog to the Sonos line-in. I’d long wished for higher sound quality possible, as well as further connection options for the Connect since it’s quite literally been the hub of everything. Well it’s role was just replaced.
The Node 2i is now in the position the connect occupied. Immediate benefits: it has analog input 3.5mm stereo as well as shared optical input (something Connect lacks, as well as Port surprisingly) with 3.5mm TOSLINK adapter, so I can now feed fixed line-level digital optical from the LG TV to it. It also supports IR learning so I can easily control volume functions of the Node 2i with the TV remote (another thing I’d always wanted from Connect). I’ve the analog stereo output from the Node connected to the Marantz receiver AUX input, just as the connect used to do. The quality of the DAC on the NODE is spectacular in comparison to the Connect and the difference was noticeable immediately (and I’ve yet to even play any MQA or 192/24 hi-res audio - just CD quality audio itself is far better better), with far more detail, separation etc. It’s palpable. Naturally the audio from TV is worlds better as well. The sound that the Node 2i can supply is worlds above the Connect, plain and simple, on all fronts. This also allows me to play streaming and local media via PLEX without the past drop in quality as compared to the native playback from the Node (BlueOS) itself. It’s just as good and in many ways a lot more convenient (we love our PLEX server).
I then took a spare optical/digital-to-analog converter I had lying around (this is where I do wish the Node has dual analog outputs fro simplicity but this is fine) and sent to it the optical output from the Node, which is then converted and then sent via RCA to the Sonos Connect’s LINE-IN. The RCA output from the Connect is finally sent to the good old Tape/2 monitor channel on the Marantz receiver.
So….. now all I need to do in order to have whole-house is to group how I want within Sonos controller and press play on the line-in, and switch the Marantz over two Tape-2 (this is in order to eliminate the slight sync differentiation between the Node and the Connect - it all needs to be routed via the Connect for whole-house syncing) and I’ve got music throughout the house again. There is a that same quality reduction present when listening via the downstream Connect from the Marantz as compared to directly from the Node, but if I have it playing throughout the house we’re usually doing some other activity, e.g. I’m not really just sitting and listening to the music closely. And when I do want to listen closely, I just go back to AUX for the Node’s direct signal.
This has gotten long but just wanted to share this use case. Sonos will still be used to some extent for playback in the other rooms individually for the time being, but proof-of-concept for using the Sonos network as merely a speaker network is a go in my house.
I’ll not even get into the many details I’m enjoying about the BlueOS interface, especially having so much control back at the desktop app version once again! Overall it’s been a damn good audio Sunday around here - and I’ve oddly the end-of-support announcement from Sonos to thank. :)
 

@chickentender : good for you. Your set up is one of those that is very hard to understand in the above form and very simple to figure out when seen in the real world. To allow everyone to substitute for the not possible latter, why don’t you draw and post a simple hand drawn sketch that shows the set up with arrows indicating the path and direction of how the signal moves?

Happy to. I’m certainly not a CAD user, so wiring diagrams are well outside my wheelhouse, but a janky little sketch is right up my alley. 
It does sound a bit complicated but it really isn’t. Many might ask “why don’t you use a soundbar” for a setup like this and my answer is that I’ve never wanted to. I route everything into the Marantz and my two main speakers entirely. Soundbars and surround systems have never interested me. I’d much rather have quality simplicity at this point, and that’s what this achieve for me personally.
(I listen to a large amount of vinyl still as well which is just direct from the turntable to the receiver/speakers - I’ve never bothered making that whole-house because if I’m listening to records, I’m not wandering around the house.)